The Central Rappahannock Regional Library is dedicated to featuring new and inspiring technologies for the community. For the past year we have been demonstrating 3-D printing with our Mobile MakerLab. The library can offer much more now that a permanent MakerLab has been set up at our England Run Branch.

Thanks to a generous partnership with the University of Mary Washington, library staff and university students are able to teach customers of all ages about aspects of STEM (Science, Technology, Engineering, and Math) through demonstrations and hands-on activities.

In A Life Like Mine: How Children Live Around the World, we are introduced to 18 children from different continents, such as Mahasin and her family, nomadic cattle herders in Sudan. Mahasin is nine years old and attends a traveling school for children. When she’s not learning lessons, she likes to weave baskets and help her mother and sisters cook their staple meal, asida, a dish of vegetables and grains mixed with spices. We also meet Isa, age 10, who lives in Sierra Leone and was taken by fighters in the country’s civil war for two years. Now he is back with his family, attending school, planting a few crops, and playing checkers with his friends. The stories and photographs of these children’s lives are fascinating and will appeal to any child who wonders how the world’s children are alike and different.